Doug Newcomb
, ContributorDriving the conversation on the connected car and mobilityOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Delphi's self-driving Audi doesn't have noticeable sensors on the outside to more closely resemble a production vehicle. Photo by Doug Newcomb.

“Wait, did you switch on the turn signal,” I asked the person behind the wheel of an autonomous Audi Q5 developed by Delphi, “or did the vehicle do that on its own?” The test driver didn’t answer. Instead he closely watched the driver on the opposite side of the intersection near Delphi’s lab in Mountain View, California as she crawled along without signaling her intentions.

“The automated system takes over and drives the route once it’s program,” Glen DeVos, Delphi’s VP of services, said from the backseat. As we watched the pokey human driver slowly turn right – sans signal – the Audi accelerated through the intersection just as the light turned yellow.

It’s the kind of scenario that human drivers confront every day and that autonomous technology will need to negotiate before its ready for the road. But judging from this and other situations that the autonomous Audi confronted on a drive to demonstrate the Centralized Sensing Localization and Planning (CSLP) system the company is developing with Mobileye, the technology has the potential to accelerate self-driving.

It does this by using an array of sensors and sophisticated processing that will allow the technology to go into production by 2019. DeVos explained that the Audi uses “one lidar sensor facing rear, another facing the front, and on all four corners.”

But unlike a Google self-driving Lexus RX, one of which I spotted on the way to the Delphi Lab (and rode in last year), the Audi Q5 has lidar sensors incorporated into the vehicle so that there isn’t a gangly gumball-machine-looking contraption on top. “We wanted it to look like a production vehicle and integrate the sensors where they would be in production,” DeVos added.

In addition to the lidar sensors, the Audi also has a forward-looking radar sensor and one at each corner of the car. “With our Mobileye partnership,” DeVos added, “we’ll put full surround-view cameras as well as the latest tri-view camera looking forward, so it will be the most advanced vision system available.”

Throughout the half-hour drive, the CSLP system showed how self-driving technology is quickly evolving by deftly handling situations similar to the left turn at the traffic light that started the demo. “One of the things we want to do is understand all these interesting use cases,” said DeVos.